CAMEX-3 Aircraft Measurements of Lightning Electric Fields

1998 data from the Convection And Moisture EXperiment 3 (CAMEX-3) campaign captures the electrical structure of storms. The dataset contains vector electric field components (Ex, Ey, Ez), air conductivity, and navigation data collected by the Lightning Instrument Package aboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft. It enables analysis of total lightning activity and storm electric currents.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the 3D electric field vector (Ex, Ey, Ez) to map the electrical structure within specific storms.
• Identifying total lightning events (cloud-to-ground and intracloud) from abrupt changes in the electric field time series.
• Deriving storm electric currents by combining electric field measurements with air conductivity data from the probes.
• Studying the relationship between aircraft navigation data and measured electrical parameters during storm overflights.
• Calibrating or validating ground-based or satellite-based lightning detection systems with in-situ aircraft measurements.

Strengths

• Provides vector electric field measurements from an aircraft platform, offering a detailed 3D perspective unavailable from ground stations.
• Covers a wide dynamic range, from fair weather fields (tens of V/m) to large thunderstorm fields (tens of kV/m).
• Includes complementary data streams (field mills, conductivity probes, navigation) enabling derived products like storm currents.
• Dataset is hosted by authoritative sources (NASA) and appears on multiple platforms, indicating established scientific use.

Limitations

• Key structural metadata like row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the 'last updated' date, with one listing 1998-09-27 and others listing 2026-03-13, creating uncertainty about recent modifications.
• The license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without details, requiring further investigation for reuse.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Collection Method

Measurements gathered by the Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) flown aboard the NASA ER 2 aircraft during the CAMEX-3 field campaign.

Time Range

1998 (from the nasa_earthdata 'last updated' field, inferred as the campaign year).

Freshness

2026-03-13 07:08:54.160519 (from datagov, though this conflicts with the 1998 date from nasa_earthdata).

Geography

Areas overflown by the ER-2 aircraft during the CAMEX-3 experiment, which focused on Atlantic basin hurricanes and tropical storms.